Into the Darklands

by Nigel Latta

  Because of that many of us think the only way to really understand why monkeys steal bananas is to stick them in a box and measure the number of times they push a lever. In the real world monkeys live in trees.

  ‘I just want to know why I did it,’ Barry whined again. He’d been convicted for sodomising his nephew so badly the boy had needed reconstructive bowel surgery.

  ‘How will that help you?’ I asked.

  ‘I just need to know, because then I can understand it,’ Barry said, with eyes that drooped like a pathetic beagle. He was using the ‘why’ question as a way to avoid working. He kept telling himself he couldn’t go forward until he knew why.

  ‘You really want to know?’

  ‘Yes, I really do.’

  I sighed. ‘Well, I could tell you all kinds of reasons why. I could tell you that you did it because you feel too inadequate to approach someone your own age. I could tell you it was about repressed homosexuality. I could tell you that you did it because it was a way to express the power and control you feel is your right as a man. I could tell you that you did it because you felt depressed and the sex was a distraction from those negative feelings. I could tell you that you did it because you wanted emotional intimacy but had no way to get it in an appropriate way because your parents didn’t teach you how. I could tell you that you did it because you hated the boy’s mother for making you feel stupid. I could tell you that you did it because the boy represented yourself at that age and it was an act of self-punishment. I could tell you that you did it because you wet the bed when you were ten, or the way your mother potty-trained you, or that your father was emotionally unavailable. I could tell you it was because the planets were aligned in a particular way, or solar flares from the sun disrupted your brain functioning.’ I paused.

  ‘But the majority of that would be psychological bollocks. In the end you did it because you were selfish and you wanted to. You did it because you wanted sex. You did it because you were only interested in yourself and you didn’t give a shit about that poor little boy. In the end, the only thing I can tell you with any degree of certainty, is that you did it simply because you wanted to come.’ And again I pause.

  He’s so still he isn’t even blinking.

  ‘Now, Barry, we can spend a bunch of time talking about all that why bullshit until we come up with something that makes you feel better, or we can focus on how you did it and how you can make sure you don’t do it again. What do you want to do?’

  He looked at me for a few moments. ‘The second one,’ he said at last.

  I smiled. ‘Good choice.’

  In the end, people do bad things because they can.

  I have bugger all interest in all the academic blah-de-blah about why people do bad things. You can make up any number of stories about why a person does something and in the end they’re only stories. I’m pretty much only ever interested in how they can make sure they don’t do it again. If I’m sitting in a room with some bad guy, I can’t change the world, I can’t address any political or social injustices that may have contributed to him doing what he did. I’ll leave that to other people. My concern is more immediate. My concern is him, and the things I need to do to help him change.

  RAGE, RESENTMENT AND SEX

  THE HARDEST THING in my job isn’t what you can do; it’s what you can’t.

  The first time I met Sam he was 17. He’d been convicted for masturbating in front of two 10-year-olds from his car, and sentenced to a period of supervision. This meant he had to comply with strict conditions, including participating in counselling, or he’d be sent to jail. On the face of it he was pretty minor league, but you should never judge a flasher by his cover. It’s what’s going on behind his eyes that’s the most important thing.

  I was working in a community-based sex-offender treatment programme at the time and Sam joined the adolescent stream. The programme involved group, individual and family therapy over a period of 18 months to two years. I picked Sam’s case up when he first came into treatment, and I have to say that the thing that most struck me about him when I first met him was his piggy eyes. That’s not a particularly clinical description, I know, but these are the details that sometimes leap out at you. Sam was overweight, unpleasant-looking, and most of all he had piggy eyes.

  Right from the start he set off warning bells. When he spoke about his victims there was a clear tone of contempt. He didn’t even try to fake remorse.

  ‘Are you angry at the girls?’ I asked him.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they shouldn’t have narked on me.’ And he really meant it.

  Another thing about Sam that struck me was the fact that there was absolutely no sense of connection between us in the whole time I worked with him. I’m pretty good at finding some connection with even the most unlikeable people. We don’t necessarily need to like each other, but there’s usually some sense that you’re engaging with a warm-blooded mammal on the other end.

  With Sam it always felt cold. He was more reptilian.

  It was only when I started asking him about his fantasies that it really started to become clear why I had this niggling sense of alarm.

  ‘What were you thinking when you were looking at the girls?’ I asked him.

  ‘Nothing.’

  I shook my head. ‘You’re sitting there in your car, with an erection, masturbating, looking at a ten-year-old girl walking past.’

  ‘Well I wasn’t,’ he replied, his tone that of a petulant child.

  All sex offenders, without fail, find it harder to talk about what they were thinking than what they actually did. A man can tell you about holding down a seven-year-old boy and sodomising him, but when you ask what he was thinking as he was doing it 99 percent of the time he’ll either say ‘Nothing’ or ‘I don’t know’.

  Over several sessions Sam grudgingly admitted he’d been thinking about ‘touching’ the girls. His description of what he wanted to do was bland and devoid of feeling, yet his whole manner suggested the exact opposite. He was angry and resentful at the world. He didn’t have any friends to speak of, no job and no prospects. It made absolutely no sense to me that, in the context of the generalised sense of failure and resentment he felt about his life, his fantasies could be so benign.

  Sam had an interest in writing, and initially I hoped this would be an inroad I would be able to use to start to explore his inner world. Our shared interest in writing should have been an effective way to bridge the emotional void between Sam and the rest of the world.

  Instead it was more of the same. He showed me a few stories, and I encouraged him to write more, thinking that perhaps this might be a mode I could utilise to get him thinking about some of the issues he needed to work out if he was ever going to reduce his risk of reoffending. His stories were interesting from a clinical perspective. Mostly they were science fiction and involved a solitary male ‘hero’ fighting some greater enemy. There was no evidence of emotional life or connection in his characters, and he showed no interest in developing this aspect of his writing, despite lots of encouragement.

  I set him one exercise where I wanted him to write a first-person narrative as a victim, to try and get him to develop a greater sense of empathy for his own victims. It took him three weeks to do it and the results were pretty much as I expected, sadly lacking in any ability to see things from a victim’s perspective.

  As time went on I became more and more concerned. On the face of it there was still no firm evidence that Sam was any greater risk than any other flasher, but the nagging sense of alarm inside me kept increasing. After a while you start to develop an instinctive awareness of the myriad subtle cues that delineate different kinds of offenders. He also became more obstructive and aggressive during our sessions. He never became physically threatening; instead his manner suggested that, given the right circumstance, there was nothing he would have liked like more than to cause me some serious harm.

  ‘Are you a
ngry right now?’ I asked him one day.

  ‘No,’ he said, but he smiled as he said it.

  ‘What’s that smile about then?’

  He grimaced, baring his teeth. ‘I’m just happy to be here with you.’ The sarcasm practically dripped off the end of his chinny chin chin.

  ‘Actually, Sam, I think you hate my guts.’

  ‘Nooo, Nigel. I think you’re a great guy.’

  ‘That’s about the least convincing lie I’ve heard all week.’

  He just shrugged.

  His progress in the groups was unsatisfactory, and his progress in the individual sessions wasn’t much better. A dynamic soon began to emerge between us that was more about intellectual sparring than a therapeutic relationship. If I could outfox him, or do some other clever thing, he would give me a little more. This was far from ideal, but after having tried everything I could to form a relationship and failing, I knowingly entered into his game. If nothing else at least I was gaining some more information about what went on inside him.

  One day, out of the blue, he told me he’d been sexually abused by a female cousin.

  ‘Do your parents know?’

  He nodded, affecting a pained look.

  ‘What did they do?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Maybe it was true, and maybe it wasn’t, but the way he told me smelled like a trap. It felt like he’d thrown a rotting piece of meat at my feet and asked me to eat it.

  Finally, as a last resort, I sent him on the residential victim-empathy weekend with the adults. I was a facilitator on these weekends now and made sure Sam attended the group I would be co-leading. My hope was that the phenomenally intense group process would initiate some shift in him. Even before he went I knew it was a slim hope.

  His performance over the weekend was dismal and succeeded only in alarming me even more. He didn’t connect with any of the other members of the group and remained aloof and alone. In the group sessions he was similarly disconnected from the work. I only saw him display emotion on two occasions. The first was when he was talking about being bullied at school, and the second was during his victim-empathy role-play when, in the heat of the drama, I told him to express himself to his victims. He kicked the chair over and said, ‘I don’t give a fuck.’ Both times the emotion I saw most clearly was rage.

  If nothing else, my observations of Sam over the weekend helped me to become clearer about what I thought was going on in his head. In brief, my theory was that he was a fat, unattractive, nerdy kid of average intelligence who lived in a fairly emotionally distant family. He had no close emotional support, no one to turn to for help with his problems. I believe the majority of his rage and resentment came from his treatment at the hands of his peers. He was the object of universal ridicule at school. Everyone hated him and the other kids picked on him every chance they could get. He was the target of every bully. Sam never hit back, but he did have a burning rage. I think this rage festered in him like a boil, until he hit adolescence, when it collided with sex. As a result I believed his sexual fantasies were probably sadistic and very violent. I think Sam didn’t give a shit about the world because in his eyes it had never given a shit about him.

  In our first session after the weekend I put this theory to him, telling him how I’d observed him over the three days of the weekend and in the weeks preceding it. I told him I didn’t believe him when he said that he had ‘only’ wanted to touch the girls. I told him I thought he had more to tell.

  Sam listened quietly through the whole thing. When I finished talking I just sat there. I didn’t ask a question. The next move had to be his.

  ‘I do,’ he finally said with his ever-present faint sneer.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘I do have more to tell.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Next time,’ he said.

  It was all about control with him.

  ‘I’d like you to tell me now.’

  ‘I don’t want to tell you now, I want to think about it first.’

  ‘What do you have to think about?’

  He shrugged. ‘Just stuff.’

  I was thinking very quickly in that moment. I believed he was a high-risk offender, and chances were he was currently actively planning to do something very bad. It was my belief he was fantasising about abducting, raping and possibly killing a child. The problem was that at that point I had absolutely no evidence to support this. He hadn’t said anything or done anything concrete I could use as evidence to get him recalled into court. All I had was my experience and intuition, and those aren’t sufficient grounds. I didn’t like it at all, but I didn’t see that I had much choice.

  ‘I want to see you in two days,’ I said. ‘I’m going to be away next week.’ That was a lie, but I needed to see him as soon as I could.

  As soon as he left I called his probation officer and outlined my concerns. Whilst Sam hadn’t said anything to date, I’d been laying a bit of a trap for him over the last several weeks. I’d given him a series of therapy assignments to complete in his own time, and of course he hadn’t done any of them. I’d carefully documented all of this so at the very least I had evidence of his noncompliance with treatment. You always need to be running a Plan B when you work with people like Sam.

  The probation officer was very experienced and said he would see Sam the next day for a ‘routine’ check-in. I also indicated I would be forwarding a written report to him after my next meeting with Sam. I said that I believed there was currently a high risk Sam would reoffend—he wasn’t responding to treatment, and therefore he should be recalled to court and, hopefully, locked up.

  We both agreed this is what should happen. It was just a matter of having some supporting evidence.

  I went home, hoping that two days wouldn’t be too long. There was nothing else I could have done, I was clear about that, but that would have been cold comfort if Sam abducted or killed a child in the next 48 hours.

  DEATH THREATS

  THE TWO DAYS I HAD to wait before my next appointment with Sam seemed like a very long time. I kept an anxious eye on the newspapers and television, hoping nothing would happen, and I went over and over my strategy in my head. Not only that, but I also discussed the case with an experienced colleague. This stuff is too important to trust your own judgement without question.

  I knew his being sent to jail wouldn’t do anything to reduce his risk over the longer term, but at least he would be contained. At least for the time he was inside he couldn’t hurt anyone. If he’d been engaging in treatment or making any observable progress, I might have been prepared to keep going. I couldn’t justify continuing with therapy when he was clearly making no progress. If anything he seemed to be getting more hostile and controlling.

  Friday eventually rolled around, and I wondered if Sam would arrive for his appointment. He was right on time.

  ‘So?’ I said as we sat down.

  ‘So, what?’

  ‘So you had some more to tell me.’

  ‘Oh yeah, I did say that, didn’t I.’

  I wasn’t really in the mood for his games. Besides, I couldn’t let him think he had me dangling on a hook. ‘Look, Sam, tell me if you want to, don’t if you don’t. Just don’t stuff me around.’ I sat there looking as if I had somewhere else to be.

  He finally shrugs. ‘What happens if I do tell you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Who do you tell?’

  ‘Like I said at the very start, the things we talk about are confidential unless either you or someone else is at risk. Then I do what I have to do to make sure everybody is OK.’

  ‘Would you tell my probation officer?’

  ‘I would do whatever I needed to do.’

  ‘But would you tell him?’

  I frowned. ‘Of course I would, and you know it. I’d tell the Seventh Cavalry if it came down to it. I’d hire a hot-air balloon and blast it out from loudspeakers if that’s what it took. So can we stop all this screwing around
and get on with it?’

  With the Sams of this world you must never let them feel you’re beholden to them. If that happens you’re lost, because there’s nothing they like better than watching someone spin.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, like I said before, I think you’ve had a pretty shitty time of it. I think people were really mean to you in school, and I think you’re angry about that. I put that together with your sexual offending and it doesn’t make any sense to me.’ I’m phrasing it carefully, because I want him to feel as if I understand what he did. I call it strategic collusion. ‘So when you say you just wanted to touch those girls it doesn’t make sense to me.’

  He smiles. ‘I know what you’re trying to say. You think I was thinking about snatching them.’

  ‘Well, were you?’

  He pauses for a moment, smiling his cold little smile. ‘Yeah.’

  And there it is. ‘Tell me about that,’ I say.

  And so he does. It turned out Sam fantasised about abducting a 10- or 11-year-old girl and taking her to a deserted location on the coast. Once he had her there he said he wanted to tie her up, rape her, torture her and kill her.

  ‘What would you do to her?’ I ask, neutrally.

  ‘I’d probably cut her with a knife or something.’

  ‘How would you kill her?’

  ‘I’d strangle her.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then I’d just drive off and leave her there.’

  ‘Do you have a knife?’

  ‘I could get one.’

  ‘And what would you tie her up with?’

  ‘Rope. There’s some in the garage at home.’

  ‘Who would you grab?’